A while back I posted a little joke about why Marty McFly's father George, in the movie Back to the Future, is the worst science fiction writer ever. One of my complaints was that George couldn't bring himself to publish his stories until a midnight encounter with a fake "spaceman" convinced him it was all real. I scoffed at that.
And I was right to scoff. One aspect of the science fiction field which always seems to surprise outsiders is how staunchly skeptical we are. Among science fiction writers and editors I doubt you'll find any who believe that UFOs are spaceships from other worlds. (I'd like to say the same about SF fans, but I know it isn't true.) There are few who believe in psychic powers, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or any of the other topics beloved of late-night AM radio.
Note that — contra McFly — one doesn't need to believe in these things to write about them. Writers can and do write stories about psychic powers, flying saucers, and even ghosts. They just know those things are fiction.
There are many reasons for this skeptical approach. First is the generally higher level of scientific literacy among SF professionals. Most of them aspire at least to the "educated layman" level, and we have a strong contingent of professional scientists in the club. This, I suspect, is the primary reason why SF writers don't go in for UFOs: we can imagine better alien spaceships than a bunch of aluminum Frisbees pestering yokels in the remote and benighted Pacific Northwest.
But there's another big reason for science fiction's innate skepticism: it got an early inoculation against quackery and woo. That inoculation came courtesy of Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, and a writer he discovered and promoted, Richard Shaver.
There's an interesting book about the two men and the "Shaver Mystery" they created — which briefly made Amazing the biggest-selling science fiction magazine in the country. It's called War Over Lemuria, by Richard Toronto, and is well worth reading.
Very briefly: Richard Shaver was a man with a vivid imagination and some serious mental problems. He was institutionalized a couple of times, and for a while lived as a vagabond. His symptoms sound a lot like classic schizophrenia: he heard voices, which he eventually identified as thoughts beamed into his mind by evil "deros" — degenerate dwarfs living in vast ancient underground cities, who amused themselves by tormenting (and occasionally abducting) surface-dwelling humans.
Shaver wrote up his discoveries about the deros, and sent them to Ray Palmer, the energetic promoter who edited Amazing Stories. Palmer rewrote them and published them. But despite the fact that Amazing was a science fiction magazine, Palmer took the unusual step of presenting Shaver's accounts of his encounters with deros and adventures under the earth as fact.
The result was a huge controversy within the SF field. This all took place in the late 1940s, just as science fiction was seeing the first light of respectability shining down on it. After all, the world suddenly had atomic bombs, radar, rockets, and computing machines. All that "Buck Rogers stuff" didn't look so silly after all, did it?
The "Shaver Mystery" series in Amazing was a threat to that respectability. It was, or at least it sure sounded like, genuine crazy-talk. SF fan clubs reacted vigorously: they denounced Palmer and Shaver, they expelled pro-Shaver members, and they organized letter-writing campaigns to Palmer's bosses at Ziff-Davis publishing.
Eventually William Ziff asked Ray Palmer to dial it back, and Palmer —either from genuine belief in Shaver's stories or because he resented the interference — decided to leave Amazing and start his own magazine. Amazing returned to its old niche as a science fiction magazine.*
I think the experience of the "Shaver Mystery" gave the whole science fiction field a huge shove toward the skeptical side where paranormal claims are concerned. In effect, Ray Palmer and his critics forced science fiction fans to choose a side: believer or skeptic, and most chose to be skeptics. That set the tone from then on.
Even when John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, became interested in psychic powers, he was careful to keep his statements within the bounds of scientific possibility (and that was the era of J.B. Rhine's experiments at Duke, when psychic phenomena were at their peak of respectability). And since the end of the Campbell era, science fiction's devotion to skepticism has grown only more solid.
Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer inoculated science fiction against woo, and so far, that early resistance has endured.
*Richard Shaver, to his great credit, was able to overcome his mental issues and managed to build a stable life for himself as a farmer and artist.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.